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Mar 08, 2016 By Max Bloom Web Exclusive

Best and Worst Show is our recurring guest blog series where the artist writes about the best and worst shows they ever played. For this installment, Max Bloom of four-piece Yuck writes about a memorable CMJ show and the mad dash to make it to a festival in Ireland. The band’s third album, Stranger Things, was released a couple of week’s ago via the band’s own Mamé Records.

Yuck are performing at Under the Radar‘s Wednesday SXSW day party next Wednesday at the Flamingo Cantina at 6th and Red River (515 E. 6th Street, Austin, TX 78701). The party is free and open to the public; head over to the Eventbrite page for our SXSW parties to RSVP. Yuck goes on at 4:05 PM and the rest of the lineup features Caveman, Sunflower Bean, England’s Fear of Men, Spain’s Hinds, Australia’s Hockey Dad, and England’s HÆLOS. The full set times are below and all the info on our three SXSW 2016 events can be found here.

Best Show:

This wasn’t necessarily our best show, but it was definitely the most memorable. It took place in New York during CMJ a couple of years ago at a place called Cake Shop in the Lower East Side. It was a last minute show and we were on at about midnight. We were all a bit tired from a week’s worth of hard work. There were only about 30 people there because we only put the word out on Twitter a few hours before. During the show there was this one guy who was slumped on the front of house speaker, completely passed out. I found it absolutely amazing that this guy had the ability to sleep through such loud noise and activity happening around him. During the last song, he managed to wake up a little bit, so I put my guitar around him just to see what would happen. He immediately darted up onstage and started trying to play, lost his balance, and fell backwards into the huge Marshall stack behind him. The whole thing crashed to the ground and he was just lying on top, passed out again. I think he managed to give a weak thumbs up. Everyone in the whole room was laughing hysterically. Bob Boilen from NPR was also in the audience that night, and he found it so funny that he felt the need to tell the story on All Songs Considered the next week.

Worst Show:

Again, the show was actually pretty good, it was just the shit that happened around it that makes it stick out in my memory. We were booked to play Electric Picnic festival in Ireland about five years ago. It takes about an hour to get from our home in East London to Heathrow Airport, and due to a logistical error and general bad planning we ended up leaving our home an hour before our flight was taking off. Having resigned ourselves to the fact that we would definitely be missing our flight, we began calling the festival, arranging new tickets with the airline, and we realized we would still make it to the show in good time. However, when we got out of the cab at the airport, our sound guy realized that he had forgot his passport back in East London. He immediately got a cab back while we waited for him in departures, constantly on the phone with him getting updates on his location. We missed three more flights while we were waiting for him, and we worked out that we had to get the next flight otherwise we would risk missing the show entirely. Our sound guy advised us to just get on that flight, and he would try and make it down to the festival if he could. Luckily, he managed to make it onto the flight as the gate was closing. We rushed off the plane, and raced down the motorway urging the cab driver to go faster. We arrived at the festival five minutes before we were due to play. We rushed into the office with sweat dripping down our faces. “What’s your band name?” asked the stage manager. “Yuck,” we said. “You’re not playing today, you’re on this time tomorrow.” At that point all we could do was laugh.

Under the Radar SXSW Day Party at Flamingo Cantina, Wednesday, March 16:

5:00 PM: Caveman
4:05 PM: Yuck
3:15 PM: Sunflower Bean
2:25 PM: Fear of Men
1:35 PM: Hinds
12:45 PM: Hockey Dad
12:00 PM: HÆLOS

www.yuckband.com